Xarkly

 

 

 

 

The air in the dungeon felt still.

 

Despite the half-dozen people gathered in the room - from Ailred’s steely expression to Tatiyana’s fiery glare - the silence was stark, broken only by faint shifts of mail, and the din of New Valdev beyond the dungeon’s doors. Villorik Patriarch Jorenus did not know for how long he stood staring down at the prisoner; all he did know was that, no matter what happened, he knew this moment would be burned into his memory until the day he died.

 

 

With red horns poking through her pale hair like a stunted crown, the Cursed Child that had been one of Villorik’s - one of the White Comet’s, and one of all Canondom’s - foremost targets stared up with anticipating, crimson eyes. Though she was flanked with Tatiyana, who held a tight grip on her arm, and Joakim Colborn, whose mace was ready to bring any upset to the interrogation to a swift end, Villorik was hardly aware of any else in the room.

 

 

Besides her - Laelia.

 

 

After all this time, he told himself as he stared down through the visor of his winged helmet. After such a long hunt. He felt blood pulse through the fingers that held his glaive. We’re finally here. His breaths seemed quick; his eyes were unblinking. Amaya can finally be avenged.

 

 

For eight long years, Villorik had hunted Laelia and her crimson eyes. From Kaethul to Nevaehlen to Celia’nor, he had expunged every lead, followed every trail. He had sliced more hands with aurum than he could count, parsed for more Infernal Grimoires than he could recall, in the hopes of finding this woman, of undoing her disguise. Of bringing her to justice.

 

 

And now, here she was. Trapped, and surrounded by more than half a dozen blades ready to cut her down. Leonid, Tatiyana, Joakin, Emma, Karl, Asif, Ailred, Caspian, and Rhys all beheld her with hard eyes, ripe with grim satisfaction, as they awaited Laelia’s sentencing - her punishment, for the murder of the beloved Queen Amaya eight years past, a woman who had only ever shown the Cursed Children love and affection that the rest of the world denied them.

 

 

“Do you seek redemption, Laelia of Hallowcliffe?” he had asked at last. He was surprised to hear his own voice, icy and stoic. He had always imagined that, when this moment came, it would be with fire that he spoke.

 

 

“ … I deny that name,” came her reply, laced with a defiant bitterness. “I do.” Something shimmered in her eyes - something equally defiant. “Towards that purpose, I will expose all the rot I know. That … that’s the least I can do.”

 

 

As the others in the dungeon grunted in dismissal. I don’t care if you gave me Sarryn’s head on a silver platter, Villorik said to himself, though his expression changed not a whit. Nor Aden’s. Not even Iblees’ itself. For what you did … there can be no redemption.

 

Unbidden, a memory crossed his mind. Faces flashed through it - another Cursed Child; a lavender-skinned Elf; a long-dead Queen. He felt something … shift.

 

 

“Did Sermi ever tell you,” he began again, then, though now his voice was slow and thick, “of the wheat?”

 

 

Something similar shifted in Laelia’s blood-red eyes. “ … No.”

 

 

And so, Villorik spoke the very words he had long ago to another Cursed Child on the roads of Waltonburg, overlooking the budding summer harvest. “Throughout one’s life … do their actions grow more wheat than they raze? That is how redemption is measured, Laelia … If you seek it, then the grain you sow must grow higher than the mounds of ashes you have left.”

 

 

 

 

 

Although they were sequestered in a dungeon beneath the Brotherhood of Saint Karl barracks, Villorik could almost feel the same breeze stir his white cloak the day he had spoken as much to Sermi - before her true betrayal. It was more than that, though; it was the same breeze from when he had stood atop the road to Morteskvan with Ilaria and spoke of redemption.

 

 

“So, Laelia.” With a faint creak of his glove’s leather, he tightened his grip on his glaive. “How will your grain be grown?”

 

 

It doesn’t matter, a voice whispered in his head. Nothing she can say will change her fate. Nothing she can say will bring Amaya back.

 

 

“The White Cat,” she began earnestly, then, “she intends to undo the shackles that keep Iblees bound. If she has her way … then he will walk the world once more. I wish to stop that from happening.”

 

 

That much, Villorik had expected - a vow to undo the work of her master, and tear down that which she had built. But that doesn’t matter, he reminded himself. Nothing can undo the damage she did. Amaya is never coming back.

 

 

As his grip grew tighter on the glaive, he could picture her face - Amaya’s face - on their last day together. He could remember that shimmering look in the Queen’s eyes that saw only the good in the world; he could remember the summer sun fracture through the tree-tops, bathing the two of them in gold-slashed shadows; and he could remember the same soft breeze from then, too.

 

 

“Do you know why it is wrong for the Light to hate the Shadow?” he had asked the Queen on that day as the birds sang in the trees around them. Now, from where he stood, with the blood of Shadowspawn staining his hands, Villorik could scarcely believe he had said such a thing. And yet, he had - and he had believed it.

 

 

Beneath his visor, he closed his eyes, and indulged in that fleeting memory - his last memory of her.

 

 

“ … Value comes from contrast,” he had said as he watched a bird hop between the branches of a nearby fir. “Without cold, we would not know the meaning of heat. Without the horrors of the Shadow, there would be no comfort in the Light. And so …” He had looked to her, then, through his boyhood eyes, when Amaya had first peeled his beaten body from the Karosgrad fighting pits. “That you have lived happily … is amply evident in your sadness now.”

 

Amaya, her own eyes trained on the birds, smiled in her understanding. “To know true sorrow is to have known love. I … have loved many in this life,” she said, and, with misty eyes, glanced to where Leonid and Deia were laying out their picnic blanket some yards away. “And it has been my greatest blessing to have those who loved me back.”

 

Villorik followed her gaze, and sighed. As the sunlight dipped lower, its light became a burnished orange, filtering through the trees around them.

 

“ … That’s why, Villorik,” Amaya spoke again. “That’s why you don’t have to kill her.”

 

In that mental image, Villorik’s head snapped back to the memory of Amaya. She had never said those words - that was not part of the memory.

 

 

“Don’t you see?” the ghost of Amaya whispered softly as a wren perched in her cupped hands. “The reason I took pity on the Cursed Children in the first place … the reason I welcomed them into Haense?”

 

“ … Amaya,” Villorik whispered back to the memory. “ … They killed you. I’ve been hunting them all this time for you, so I -”

 

“Villorik,” she tutted wistfully as she stroked the wren’s neck with a ringed finger. “I cannot bear to see you like this.”

 

“Like … this?” His voice felt cracked, and hollow. “I - I’m doing this … to avenge you, Amaya! Because I couldn’t save you then!”

 

 

“... I know.” Amaya’s smile was soft, and sad. “But your hunt is in vain. Because the Laelia who stands before you now …” With a gentle motion, she let the wren take flight from her hand. “ … is not the same one that killed me.”

 

 

 

[amazing art by Ivery]

 

 

 

“Yes,” Villorik whispered out loud as the memory finally faded. The sunlight vanished, replaced by the dreary walls of the dungeon, and the creak of branches fell silent in the stead of quiet, anticipating breaths as Villorik held his glaive before Laelia. “ … I understand.”

 

 

In a swift motion, he raised his glaive, and the Lunarite edge shimmered as it streaked downwards onto Laelia’s head. The Cursed Child only sat there, waiting for the pain, and waiting for the end - but only the first of those came.

 

 

With a squelch of flesh and blood, the tip of the glaive sliced deep into the left side of her face - through the devil’s eye - and she fell to the floor with a howl.

 

 

Villorik’s stoic facade crumbled away like dust; as the wounded Cursed Child writhed on the floor, it took every fibre of his being to prevent himself from raising the blood-slicked glaive again, and finishing her off. Through blurry eyes, memories hazed in a flash; memories of golden, sunlit fields of grain.

 

 

“ … Amaya won’t rise from your blood.” His voice sounded foreign, and he knew the only person who could ever recognise the emotion was that young Colborn girl who had picked him up in those fighting pits when they were children. “ … and she won’t awaken from your bones. She is … never coming back.” He barely felt a tear roll down through his visor, through the grooves of the scar made by King Ivan, and drip onto his boot. “She was … a kind of good that I have never seen in this world. She did not just grow wheat; she was the sun that turned it golden.”

 

 

“Never forget what you are,” came the icy quip of Leonid from behind him, his own voice bubbling with rage. In his hands, he threw down a horned-skull - of another particular Cursed Child - and crushed it underboot. “Never forget what you stole.”

 

 

Villorik watched the shards of bone mingle with the blood that seeped from Laelia’s wound. “ … So, that’s why. You will spend every last minute of life you have left to bring a fraction of her light back to this world, until you are spent and dead.”

 

 

Even as he spoke, Villorik could feel the eyes of the others on him, and he could hear their silent pleas. She will betray us. She will kill us. This is not mercy. This is foolishness. They were the same voices that droned in the back of his own head. But there was something else in his head - something that muted all those voices, all those doubts. Something golden.

 

 

“ … and if you ever abscond from this duty,” he finished as he twisted the glaive, and flicked Laelia’s blood onto the floor, “I will kill everyone you have so much as smiled at.”

 

 

As Villorik turned, his white cloak swaying behind him, Laelia managed one last retort through a strained throat as the blood oozed through the fingers covering her slashed wound. “I … won’t …. Run.”

Villorik glanced back one last time, through his winged visor. “Good. You will lead us to Sarryn, Aden, and whatever other parasite of the Shadow dares to blot the Light.” Then, with purpose, he marched towards the door, but he was hardly aware of his surroundings.

 

 

… I pray, then, that I did right by you, Amaya, he thought as the barred doors opened, and the faint warmth of the Haeseni sun bore down on him as he trudged out into the streets of New Valdev.

 

You did, she whispered back.

 

 

ISSUED BY THE

ON THIS 11th DAY OF MSITZA AND DARGUND OF 527 E.S.

 

 

 

 

For on this day, the forces of the Order of the White Comet in tandem with the Brotherhood of Saint Karl did ride north through the frozen glens of the Karenina Mountains, where they sought out the bleak stone towers of Port Minas through the curtains of snowfall. So it was but one week prior that the White Comet - aided by the warriors of the House of Colborn - did vanquish he who was called Volkov, a skeletal merchant who did impart unto them the location of Port Minas.

 

 

 

 

The expeditionaries’ horses grew haggard and tired as they endured the Karenina’s slopes, her unrelenting winds, and her biting cold. Some twelve hours after their departure from New Valdev, though, the towers of their destination appeared beneath the Harrower-cursed skies. The campaign was led by Rhys Bishop Westerwald, whose skills as a huntsman of the Shadow have earned him the moniker of Bloodhound of the Light, while the Brotherhood soldiers marched beneath the command of Ser Caspian Leyland. Infiltration of the towering keep was a short and simple affair; through a piled snowbank, the expedition leapt to a buttress, where a smashed window led into the castle’s vestibule.

 

 

 

 

The castle’s host of Shadowspawn scattered like bugs beneath an overturned rock. One woman - with the given name ‘Halatir’ - was apprehended in the keep’s vestibule, where the White Comet secured and opened the main portcullis. With one half of their force left to guard the vestibule, the rest fanned through the keep. The highest towers were infiltrated by Bishop Rhys, where several rooms were marked with the names of their inhabitants. Note these names, and let them be condemned throughout all Canondom as servants of the Shadow:

 

SIRU

 

SARIEL

 

Alas, it was to the keep’s bowels, not its height. A detachment led by Ratibor Radovanic abseiled the steep cliffs upon which the keep stood, and discovered a fortified harbour built into the mouth of the rocks below, flanked by enormous sculptures. Therein, Radovanic’s detachment located the remaining Shadowspawn - all but one had turtles behind a portcullis. As Radovanic himself ascended back to the keep atop the mountain to pass word to Patriarch Villorik and Ser Caspian, while Davyd Colborn did battle with the one exposed Shadowspawn - it was later learned this one bore a cursed name, one that invokes pain to speak and write. He shall be referred herein as ‘D’, and his true name recounted once below.

 

 

 

 

Bid by Radovanic, the bulk of the expedition descended to the harbour to assist Davyd Colborn, while Tatiyana vas Ruthern and Karl Weiss were dispatched back to New Valdev with Halatir as their prisoner. Below in the harbour, ‘D’ was defeated and bound by Davyd Colborn, while beyond the gate, a Shadowspawn who proclaimed himself ‘Kryndomere’ invoked the title of ‘Gravelord’. To his aid, Kryndomere called two monstrosities of warped flesh, but no battle would follow; for the gate that separated Kryndomere and the expedition would not open. The expedition searched what parts of the harbour remained open, and discovered a shrine to a being dubbed ‘Mordring’.

 

 

 

 

To New Valdev the expedition withdrew, with two captives in tow and some foundational knowledge of Port Minas, which is now confirmed to be the redoubt of some fell necromancers. Once returned to the warmth of the city, ‘D’ spurned salvation offered by the Patriarch Villorik, and he was put to the sword by King Ivan of Haense .

 

So it is that the first of Port Minas fell, and so it is that their masters shall follow. Hark, all Canondom, and know the names of these Shadowspawn, to be spurned and slain should they ever step within the Light:

 

KRYNDOMERE

VOLKOV

DAAZHUKT

HALATIR

SIRU

SARIEL

MORDRING